For more than 80 years, the man-eating Tsavo lions have been one of the Field Museum's top tourist draws. Now a study released Monday suggests the Tsavo lions' taste for human flesh may have been exaggerated. According to the man who finally caught them in 1898, the two maneless Kenyan lions munched their way through as many as 135 people before they were shot, skinned, sold, stuffed and put on display in Chicago. The story of how they preyed on a terrified...

CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. (Reuters) - A valiant effort to put a defunct NASA science satellite back to work came to a disappointing end this week after the 36-year-old spacecraft's propulsion system failed, project organizers said. An ad hoc team of engineers and scientists won permission from NASA to try to take control of the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3, or ISEE-3. The spacecraft was launched in 1978 to study the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged...

Researchers have found that honeybees are susceptible to cocaine's lure -- they become addicted and suffer withdrawal symptoms when they no longer have access to the drug. Scientists think the findings may offer hints about how cocaine works in human brains. Read more at chicagotribune.com/hooked

ORLANDO Fla. - Oil that matches the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been found in the bodies of sickened fish, according to a team of Florida scientists who studied the oil's chemical composition. "We matched up the oil in the livers and flesh with Deepwater Horizon like a fingerprint," lead researcher Steven Murawski, a professor at the University of South Florida's College of Marine Science in Tampa, told Reuters. He said the...

Northwestern University scientists said they have found what might be the reason the bacteria that causes the plague is so deadly: missing pieces of genetic code that scientists used to think were useless. A paper published in the Aug. 29 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds light on what can make one bacteria relatively harmless while another is deadly. This understanding may lead to therapies or vaccines to help treat bacterial...

(Reuters) - Government scientists have not been able to replicate a chemical reaction suspected of causing a radiation leak at a U.S. nuclear waste dump in New Mexico, complicating efforts to understand what went wrong, a U.S. Energy Department official said Friday. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where drums of radioactive refuse from nuclear weapons sites and laboratories are buried in salt caverns 2,100 feet (640 meters) underground, has...

Apples and Apples Apple says the 600,000 orders taken for the iPhone 4 on Tuesday marked a one-day record. How many orders would they have taken had the app designed to place orders directly from the existing iPhone actually worked? Whatever it takes A Connecticut man whose arm became lodged in his home's furnace says his cries for help went unanswered for 12 hours before he eventually amputated the arm with a power saw. Jonathan Metz tells People that he thought of...

As many as 75 scientists working in U.S. federal government laboratories in Atlanta may have been exposed to live anthrax bacteria and are being offered treatment to prevent infection from the deadly toxin, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. The potential exposure occurred after researchers working in a high-level biosecurity laboratory at the agency's Atlanta campus failed to follow proper procedures to inactivate the...

L'AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) - Six scientists and a government official were sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter by an Italian court on Monday for failing to give adequate warning of an earthquake that killed more than 300 people in L'Aquila in 2009. The seven, all members of a body called the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, were accused of negligence and malpractice in evaluating the danger and keeping the central city...

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have come up with a bright idea - literally - to repair teeth. And they say their concept - using laser light to entice the body's own stem cells into action - may offer enormous promise beyond just dentistry in the field of regenerative medicine. The researchers used a low-power laser to coax dental stem cells to form dentin, the hard tissue similar to bone that makes up most of a tooth, demonstrating the process...

Brendan Casey isn't a typical movie star, but "Science at Work" isn't a typical movie. The documentary, produced by 137 Films, was commissioned by Fermilab in Batavia with the intention of putting a friendly face on the scientists who have changed physics the world over. Casey is one of a group of scientists chosen for the filmmakers to follow over two years as they study three frontiers: energy, intensity and cosmology. Casey opens the movie at home with his kids, pouring cereal...

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - A group of 53 leading scientists has warned the World Health Organization not to classify e-cigarettes as tobacco products, arguing that doing so would jeopardize a major opportunity to slash disease and deaths caused by smoking. The UN agency, which is currently assessing its position on the matter, has previously indicated it would favor applying similar restrictions to all nicotine-containing products. In an open letter to WHO...

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Residents of a sleepy hamlet in Tasmania found a previously unknown kind of giant jellyfish washed up on a beach, prompting excitement among scientists in Australia as they work to formally name and classify the creature. About 1.5 metres (five feet) across, the white jellyfish with a pink spot in the middle is believed to be a relative of the lion's mane species popularly known as a "snotty" as it resembles mucus. "There's the...

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. (Reuters) - A group of citizen scientists can take over a 36-year-old decommissioned robotic space probe that will fly by the Earth in August, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said on Wednesday. Launched in 1978, the International Sun/Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft studied how the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun, the so-called solar wind, interacts with Earthâs magnetic...

Ask Julieanna Richardson about her ScienceMakers project, documenting the work of black scientists, and she has stories to tell. There's the one about a researcher who recently gave a lecture regarding an herbicide that causes male frogs to have female parts. There's another about a roboticist who builds robots that roam the Arctic, studying ice shelves and climate change. And another about a scientist who created a condenser microphone used in cellphones. Richardson is the...

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. (Reuters) - An asteroid that exploded last year over Chelyabinsk, Russia, leaving more than 1,000 people injured by flying glass and debris, collided with another asteroid before hitting Earth, new research by scientists shows. Analysis of a mineral called jadeite that was embedded in fragments recovered after the explosion show that the asteroid's parent body struck a larger asteroid at a relative speed of some 3,000...

Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter -- unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet, and assembling two shells together...

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Superbugs resistant to drugs pose a serious worldwide threat and demand a response on the same scale as efforts to combat climate change, infectious disease specialists said on Thursday. Warning that a world without effective antibiotics would be "deadly", with routine surgery, treatments for cancer and diabetes and organ transplants becoming impossible, the experts said the international response had been far too weak. "We have...

A cross between a sleek cat and a wide-eyed teddy bear that lives in Andean cloud forests and an eyeless snail that lives in darkness 900-plus meters (3,000 feet) below ground in Croatia rank among the top 10 new species discovered last year, scientists announced on Thursday. The list, assembled annually since 2008, is intended to draw attention to the fact that researchers continue to discover new species. Nearly 18,000 were identified in 2013, adding to the 2 million...